


Deal With the Devil

by thedevilchicken



Series: The Devil You Know [1]
Category: The Chronicles of Riddick Series
Genre: Artistic Liberties, Bloodplay, Canon-Typical Violence, Community: smallfandomfest, Knives, M/M, Minor Character Death, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-09
Packaged: 2018-04-08 13:16:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4306524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-<i>Riddick</i>, Vaako comes looking for assistance. They strike a bargain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deal With the Devil

**Author's Note:**

> Note that this runs with the theatrical version of _Chronicles of Riddick_ and not the director's cut! Takes liberties with what we do/don't know about Necromonger society and yes, there are multiple minor character deaths.

He knew he was being followed. 

He’d been followed for days, not that the godforsaken little jerkwater outpost out in the back of fucking beyond had a whole lot of anything to follow him through or around or even _to_ because frankly all they’d got there was a couple of shitty towns built out of what Riddick was pretty sure was two parts dried mud and one part manure if the smell was anything to go by. It wasn’t the worst place he’d ever been, not by a long shot, but it was pretty far from the best, too. Especially as he was being followed. 

Still, he’d realised once that crawling feeling had started at the back of his neck, the one like prying eyes were on him that meant pretty soon he’d need to leave this goddamn rock behind and find a new one, that right at that precise moment in time he’d got no patience or desire at all to go stalking through dusty-ass streets that barely even had paving, trying to find the guy who was following him before the opposite thing happened. He’d spent too long dicking around on rain-washed, sun-beaten, fucking epically eclipsed planets to feel any deep-down yearning to find another one like it just to avoid another merc; hell, he decided the opposite was preferable and settled down in the darkest corner of the worst dive bar in town to wait it out and see who came. 

He looked up as the flimsy bar door opened in a cloud of dust, his drink in one hand and a good sharp blade in the other, just like he’d done the first twelve times the first day and then the second. It’d been farmers and miners every time, seamstresses looking for their drunk-ass husbands, teenagers trying their luck. This time his brows crept up just a fraction because of all the faces on all the men in all the universe, he’d never expected it to be _this_ one who showed up there; when he’d heard about Boss Johns’ little offer, more than any slam would pay if they brought Riddick in alive though fuck knew where he’d got that kind of currency, he’d expected Dahl, he’d expected Toombs with a six-man crew this time, any of a dozen other mercs who’d been on his tail in the past or maybe one that hadn’t, maybe even Big Daddy Johns himself in the end. Twenty-two crews had signed up, word was, and he’d taken out the first three in short order before heading out of the sector in his purloined ship to get away from all that shit for a while, get away from civilisation, see who got to him first and see how long it took him to dispatch them. He’d thought maybe he’d take his time. But this was _not_ the guy he’d been expecting. 

Maybe he should’ve killed him. Maybe he could’ve with the first toss of his knife, taken him out before he’d even known what’d hit him. Then again, maybe the bastard would’ve been ready for that and before the beaten-up, downtrodden patrons of that backward-ass bar had time to blink they’d’ve been right in the middle of all fucking hell breaking loose. Not that Riddick really gave a good goddamn about that, but the last thing he needed was his alcohol supply cutting off; it was pretty much all that made that bright, dusty hole even close to bearable on a day-to-day basis, as he drank away his capital. 

So yeah, maybe he should’ve killed him. Maybe he should’ve shot the place up and gotten the hell out of Dodge in a hurry. But what he did as the guy approached, one hand resting on the butt of a gun at his hip, was kick out a chair in invitation. The guy watched him steadily for a couple more seconds as he reached the chair, then he sat down opposite. 

“Riddick.”

“Vaako.” Riddick cocked his head, lifted his goggles just for a second to give him a flash of his eyes just for effect, like that had any effect on Vaako. “What the hell do you want?”

Vaako paused, almost indecisive for a moment though Riddick was pretty damn sure he didn’t have an indecisive bone in his whole body. The look of distaste was pretty clear on his face and Riddick wondered if that was aimed at the planet in general or at him in particular – Vaako had no particular love lost for his ex-lord marshal, Riddick knew that at least. Fuck, he’d sent him away to die on a wild goose chase. Maybe. Of course. 

“I came for your help,” Vaako said. 

And that was new. That was interesting. And so Riddick decided not to kill him after all, at least not yet. 

He looked different without the armour, Riddick thought as he considered him across the table after that. Yeah, it was still pretty clearly him, but without the armour he looked slighter, maybe something to do with how he’d never seen Vaako stamping dust off of a pair of beaten up combat boots and army surplus green fatigues looking for all the world, or at least all the bar, like a fucking mercenary with twin guns at his hips and a coat so long it pretty much swept the floor behind him. He’d even cut off his hair, shaved it so it was barely any longer than Riddick’s was. It was a pretty striking change. Riddick doubted he’d ever look ordinary but fuck if he wasn’t trying.

“And why the fuck would I want to help you when you sent me out to some fucking hole to die?” Riddick asked, his tone pretty goddamn jovial under the circumstances, he liked to think.

“If I’d wanted you dead, I’d’ve done it myself,” Vaako told him, and there followed a fucking horrific moment wherein Riddick had to admit that was pretty much just verbal confirmation of a suspicion he’d had nagging there in his head for months. He knew enough about the guy, had gotten to know enough while he’d been with the fleet to know that much was true, and so the story that came next made some kind of backwards-ass sense. Krone hadn’t been acting under orders, Vaako said; the betrayal wasn’t Vaako’s. And when Krone had returned to the Necromonger fleet he’d gone right ahead and taken Riddick’s place as lord marshal; after all, Necros kept what they killed and that wasn’t a deal that worked by proxy. Vaako would’ve done it himself if he’d meant to do it. He’d have held a knife to his throat in the throne room, not tipped him off a fucking cliff where no one could see it.

“He killed my wife and cast me into exile,” Vaako told him, sitting stiffly there across the table, a Necro fish out of water. And much as Riddick didn’t like the guy, he had no reason to disbelieve him. He wished he had. He wished he’d killed him before he’d opened his big mouth.

“So what do you want from me?” Riddick asked. 

“I want you to help me take back the fleet,” Vaako replied. 

“I don’t want to be lord marshal.” 

“I do.”

And Riddick laughed, because it all made sense in a fucking instant. Vaako wanted his help to put him on the throne and put Krone down in the process. He’d come all the way out to the end of nowhere to find him, for that. And so they struck a deal there at the table: he’d help Vaako kick Krone’s traitorous ass if Vaako helped him take down the fucking fleet of mercs on his tail. They’d talk about Furya after, if they both made it out alive. And they _would_ make it out alive. Riddick always did and Vaako didn’t strike him as different.

Okay, so he didn’t trust Vaako. But he thought maybe he could use him. 

***

“It ain’t gonna be over quick,” Riddick told Vaako that first day, once they’d left the bar and headed out to the basic, shitty room that he’d been renting, windows with no glass in them that let the dust in all day and night, mattress stuffed with hay like that was a thing anymore anywhere else in the whole fucking universe. When they were done talking at the table, Vaako followed him there, that same goddamn look of distaste on his face the whole way that Riddick caught in glimpses in the rare glass windows or in passers-by’s spectacles and felt like wiping right off of him with the back of one hand. He didn’t. He was pretty sure they had a deal, for the moment at least. 

“I can wait,” Vaako told him. “I’ll be patient.”

“Could be months,” Riddick said. “Could be years.”

Vaako leaned against the rickety-ass little table by the window, making the legs click on the floor as his hands spread in the gathered dust. “I don’t have a shortage of time,” he said. “I’ll be patient.”

After the first couple of months, maybe a little more, after the first merc hit the floor in a backwater slum on Tangiers, Riddick figured out why he was so blasé about the whole damn notion of time. 

He guessed back with the Necro armada he’d never paid that much attention and guessed that was what had gotten him landed on a planet that wasn’t Furya with a broken leg and a smarting sense of pride. He’d seen the Necros day in and day out but he’d not really _seen_ them, just noted in passing that none of them seemed to eat or drink or even fucking sleep. A few days on Vaako’s ship heading back in toward civilisation and he’d gotten the fact that the son of a bitch really didn’t eat or drink or sleep. He didn’t piss, didn’t shave, didn’t even brush his fucking teeth. In their two day stop on Ezekiel 2 he’d not burned in the sun, not tanned, not even a fraction while the back of Riddick’s neck was peeling like a son of a bitch. Riddick guessed Purification must’ve done that to him; made sense, since the Necros seemed to have such a hard-on for death, trying to ditch all the living parts they could to get that much closer to it. They didn’t need cryosleep. They didn’t need fucking anti-wrinkle cream. They didn’t age. 

Three weeks later, they landed on Lazarus 4. A real planet for once, not some mining camp or farming world with a shortage of water and a bad goddamn attitude to boot but actual people in actual streets, brick houses, city blocks. They took a room, together like they’d done on their first few brief planetside stops because it was cheaper that way and fuck, Vaako never slept anyway. They killed two mercs there, one the first week and one the second, guys who should’ve known better than to come alone but apparently hadn’t. After the first couple, Vaako started using knives too to keep the noise down so they wouldn’t need to find new rooms, short blades that tucked into sheaths at the small of his back and fitted right between his first and second knuckles. The first time he shrugged off his long coat and pulled out his blades and the two fought back to back like they’d practiced a few times. Then Vaako cleaned off his knives on a napkin and picked up his coat, frowned at the blood they’d inadvertently spilled on it. He started hanging it up after that, really prissy about it, which made Riddick laugh out loud more than once.

After the first week, the first merc, they were out of cash pretty much entirely; Riddick guessed that was a hazard of being a universal fucking fugitive and a Necromonger exile, neither of them exactly having hugely deep pockets and it wasn’t like they could go answer a want ad and wait tables in a fucking diner. So they took the transport out to pits on Lazarus 2 and they both got jobs out there as fighters, bare-knuckle, no-holds-barred, sometimes singles and sometimes as a team. The Lazarus system was known for the fights and okay, sure, so the pay was shitty, but it was _pay_ and no one gave a fuck who walked out alive or even if they did at all. That seemed to suit them both, and the crowd. Besides, they weren’t exactly lying low so what the fuck, it didn’t matter who knew they were there; they _wanted_ the mercs to come to them, after all. 

Word got out that Riddick wasn’t travelling alone, that the second guy was pretty much as deadly and could see in the daylight, which pretty much negated all advantages. Teams got bigger, the original sign-ups taking on more men or banding together like there was somehow safety in numbers when there was no such truth to be had. Twenty-two crews shrank into thirteen in no time. It seemed too easy, and maybe it was. 

“How old are you?” Riddick asked, one night as he iced his broken fingers in the sink. 

“Old enough to know better than to discuss it,” Vaako answered. 

“Really, how old are you?” Riddick asked, one day as he drank in a bar before a fight and Vaako pointedly didn’t. 

“Too old for your bullshit,” Vaako answered. 

“I mean c’mon, how _old_ are you?” Riddick asked, propping himself up in bed one morning when he woke to the clatter of Vaako cleaning their guns, just in case, like he did every second day or so. 

Vaako didn’t look at him, just kept on reassembling the gun currently spread out in its constituent parts across the table. “One hundred twenty-seven at last count,” Vaako answered. 

“Well, damn,” Riddick said. “Guess that Purification shit works wonders for grey hair.”

Vaako gave him a withering glance. Riddick laughed. Vaako just shook his head and continued with his guns. 

Then, slowly, Vaako started to change. It was subtle, real subtle at first, the way he’d zone out sometimes as they cleaned weapons on tables or sat together in bars, his attention snapping back in pretty quickly but there was still something kinda _off_. He wasn’t slower when they fought at night, crowds cheering them on like champions, but maybe his timing was off just a beat here and there and Riddick saw it if no one else did. When he changed his shirt after matches there were more bruises rising on his skin, a faint tan line at his neck and at his wrists. Riddick caught him sneaking a sip of water from a faucet in the shitty bathroom with the buzzing, blinking light then coughing it right back up into the john; he thought he saw him wince. Neither one of them said a word about it, but they both knew he saw. Riddick had theories. He needed to test them.

Six mercs stepped into the bar outside the fight club at the end of week eleven. You could always tell a merc a mile away, Riddick thought, something about the way they stood, the swagger as they pushed back their coats to expose guns like that meant a damn to someone like Riddick, to someone like Vaako. Vaako stood up slowly and he took off his coat, folded it over the back of a chair there out of the way, and then Riddick stood up beside him. It was familiar, not just from the fighting pits. 

“We only need Riddick, friend,” said one of the mercs as he looked at Vaako, the one Riddick supposed was their leader, such as he was in his sadly bedraggled state. Mercs were a pretty sad, downtrodden lot these days, it was a crying shame. “You can leave right now, no harm no foul.”

“Tempting,” Vaako said. “But not nearly tempting enough.” He turned to Riddick and raised his brows. “Shall we?”

Riddick grinned. He drew his knives from their sheaths at his back. “By all means,” he said. 

They moved quickly, the way they did in the pits but with the handy, deadly addition of their respective blades. Six mercs went down, two civilians caught in the mercs’ ill-conceived crossfire but he could live with that, no one in the whole damn Lazarus system would give a damn. He wiped off his blades on the lead merc’s shirt when the guy was done with his last few breaths and then he wheeled, fast, one fist catching Vaako flush in the face just the way he’d meant it to. Vaako cursed, spat, looked at Riddick hotly. Riddick had his answer. His theory was right. 

“What was that for?” he asked. 

“You felt that,” Riddick said. 

“Of course I felt it, you idiot,” Vaako said. “You hit me in the face.”

Riddick raised his brows. “I mean you really _felt_ it.”

Vaako paused but then when he smiled at him, bitter, mirthless, there was blood smeared all over his teeth. “Purification only lasts so long,” he said, and he walked away. 

That was interesting, Riddick thought. That was _really_ interesting. 

***

After eight months on Lazarus 4, Vaako started to shave. 

The first few days he just rubbed at his unexpectedly prickly jaw and watched as Riddick shaved his face like watching him was normal and Riddick guessed in a way it was, had been for months since they’d started fighting, since he’d started getting bruised. Riddick let him because hell, Vaako was pretty unobtrusive about the whole thing, watching from the table by the shuttered window, eyes on him in silence. But on the fifth day, Vaako joined him at the sink, in front of the cracked old mirror.

“I’ve forgotten how,” he said, scowling as he rubbed his nascent beard with both hands. The hair on his head was growing out now, too. Riddick had been pretending not to notice. 

Riddick smirked. “So watch and learn,” he said. 

He started with his face, the cutthroat razor so sharp he barely even felt the whisper of it on his skin, and Vaako watched. Then he did his head next, shaving off the couple of weeks of stubble right back down to his scalp, and Vaako watched. Then he pulled off his shirt and did his chest, slow and careful, mindful of the contours of muscle, the shift as he breathed, and Vaako watched. He edged down the waistband of his pants and shaved his abdomen just as smooth as the rest, right down to the base of his cock. Vaako watched. 

“The blood’ll wash off easier,” Riddick told him. 

“Interesting excuse,” Vaako said, with the faintest hint of amusement. “Now do my face.” Riddick didn’t say no. He guessed that was because he was so damn amused by the idea. 

Vaako sat back down in the chair in the near dark and Riddick stepped up close behind, goggles raised up on his forehead. He lathered Vaako’s face with the brush he’d just been using on himself and then he tilted up Vaako’s chin, exposed his throat. It would’ve been so easy to drag the blade right across Vaako’s neck and end him then and there but fuck, if he’d been going to kill him he’d’ve done it months ago so all he did was shave him, slowly, silent except for the rasp of the razorblade on stubble. And at the end, he nicked his jaw. He did it on purpose, slow and deliberate, letting a hot trickle of blood run down the side of Vaako’s neck. Vaako didn’t flinch at all. 

“You meant to do that,” Vaako said. 

“You were expecting it.”

“Of course I was.”

But when Riddick leaned in and licked away that trail of blood, from the collar of Vaako’s shirt up to the cut on his jaw, Riddick knew he hadn’t been expecting that, at least. He hadn’t been expecting it himself. He took himself by surprise. 

What happened next wasn’t planned, wasn’t scheduled, wasn’t anything Riddick had expected and he expected a lot on a day-to-day basis. Vaako kicked hard against the wall and sent his chair toppling back with himself still in it, caught Riddick totally unaware and took them both down to the floor in a muddled heap. Vaako turned, straddled Riddick’s thighs and struck him straight across the jaw with one clenched fist; Riddick fought back, of course, brought the heel of his hand up hard to the underside of Vaako’s chin and sent him sprawling back. Neither man had his blades but as Riddick’s pulse quickened he guessed that wasn’t the point; they weren’t trying to kill each other, pretty damn far from it. Vaako’s hands found his throat and squeezed. Riddick laughed breathlessly, leaning down hard on top of him, leaning into Vaako’s hands so hard he’d have a bruise like a ligature across his neck by morning. But Vaako didn’t want him dead. 

There were scars all over Vaako’s body. Riddick had seen most of them before, Vaako not exactly shy about changing in front of him in the room they still shared for some bizarre rucking reason or the locker room out at the pits, but he’d never touched and couldn’t say he’d felt a burning desire to do so till right that moment. But then they tugged at each other’s clothes, came back up to their feet pulling each other along, then Riddick got one arm around Vaako’s neck from behind and forced him down onto the bed face-first. He didn’t struggle as Riddick reached for the knife he kept by the bed, as he slit the back of his t-shirt from collar down to waist and licked a hot stripe right up the line of his spine, right up to the Purification scar by his ear. That one he wanted to touch. Vaako waited until Riddick tossed the knife aside and _then_ he struggled. 

Riddick wasn’t honestly sure if he let the son of a bitch do it or if he just got the better of him when Vaako turned beneath him and dragged his blunt nails right down his chest, still bare from shaving, right from collarbones to navel. He laughed and slapped him straight across the face then Vaako was laughing too, the sound unfamiliar, faintly hysterical around the edges as he brought his elbow up under Riddick’s jaw and knocked him down. They struggled, hands clawing till Vaako was on top of him, till Vaako’s hand came down between them and they pushed against each other, hard and urgent like Riddick hadn’t felt in months or longer. Riddick had his hands at Vaako’s throat as he came, both still clothed from the waist down, rubbing against each other like fucking oversexed teens. Vaako wasn’t long after, leaning down hard against Riddick’s hands, gasping for breath as he watched him, skin flushed hot. 

It was dumb but he’d done dumber shit than that in his life. They stood there naked together at the sink after they’d both finished, once they’d finally stripped off all their soiled clothes, washing themselves down, and that was when he realised Vaako was watching him again. Then Vaako stepped up closed, ran one rough hand over a scar by Riddick’s hip and Riddick let him, not sure why he did. He let Vaako look everywhere, touch everywhere, his fingers finding scars Riddick had long since forgotten he had, inquisitive and pretty much the opposite of gentle. Vaako was never gentle.

“Did they hurt?” Vaako asked, offhand, pressing one thumb to a line there by Riddick’s spine. 

“Yeah, they hurt,” he said. “What you’re doing now don’t exactly feel great either.”

Vaako chuckled, dark and low and close, and didn’t stop. “I don’t remember how that feels.”

“You’ll remember before we’re through,” Riddick said. 

He was pretty sure Vaako knew exactly how he meant it; there was still more to come. They weren’t even halfway done.

***

They didn’t actually fuck for three days after that and by the time they did Riddick had convinced himself it was the lousiest idea he’d ever had. Maybe Vaako wasn’t exactly his enemy but he didn’t trust him, even if he guessed in the end he could trust Vaako to be Vaako just the way Vaako seemed to trust him to be him and that was something reliable, at least. And hell, surprise of all surprises, they’d both turned out to be men of their word. 

But they fucked on the third morning after, despite Riddick’s better judgement, once they’d woken in their newest crappy lodging house in the next system over, there on Noctis Prime. They’d gotten wind of another three teams inbound toward Lazarus and figured they didn’t have to make their job easy for them. Besides, they had enough money for a while. They could go back to fighting any time they wanted.

The main, most prominent feature of Noctis Prime was the near eternal twilight due to the odd synchronicity of its three huge moons; it was still pretty much dark enough even when the sun rose for Riddick to go without his goggles though he kept them tucked into his back pocket or tucked up on his forehead when he wasn’t actually using them, just in case. That morning, he woke and looked across the room at Vaako in the chair by the window where he usually kept efficient watch though Riddick was half convinced that wasn’t necessary, usually while reading on a tablet with an odd blue glow that kept Riddick awake if he lay on the wrong side in bed. But the tablet was lying on the floor at Vaako’s feet. Vaako’s eyes were closed. The fucker was actually _sleeping_. So Riddick woke him up. 

“Oh, sleeping beauty...” he murmured, right up beside Vaako’s ear. 

Vaako’s eyes snapped open; his hand snapped up to Riddick’s neck for a second then dropped again once realisation dawned. 

“Fuck,” he said, lacking any of his usual eloquence, though Riddick guessed that summed up the situation pretty fucking succinctly. 

“Yeah, fuck,” Riddick confirmed with a quirk of his brows as he crossed the room back over to the bed. “What the fuck ever, we’ll share the bed.” Vaako eyed him, like he was trying to decide if that was a joke at his expense. “Hey, your choice. But don’t say I didn’t warn you when you get up with a crick in your neck now you can feel again, jackass.”

Vaako snorted. He came to bed. And when they woke again to the sound of Riddick’s crappy digital alarm like they even had anything much to wake for, Vaako was hard against his hip. 

“You gonna do something about that?” Riddick said, too close, too hot, too fucking familiar. His hand snaked down to press over Vaako’s erection over the fabric of his pants, that he’d still been wearing as he’d fallen asleep for the second time in a hundred years. 

Vaako’s eyes flashed hot just for a second then he kissed him, hard, almost _too_ hard if there was such a thing at all, nails of one hand scraping at the back of Riddick’s neck. He should maybe have pushed him away because distraction was the last thing either of them needed with so many mercs just a system away but he rolled back instead, brought Vaako up on top of him, the kiss all tongues and teeth and last night’s booze but neither of them seemed to care. 

The buckle of Vaako’s belt pressed hard at Riddick’s belly; he pushed him up, Vaako getting the hint and going up on his knees astride Riddick’s hips, trapping Riddick’s hard-on under him as Riddick unbuckled the belt and then whipped it out of the loops with a bright, cracking flourish. Vaako looked faintly amused at that as he tugged his own shirt up and off over his head then pulled Riddick up awkwardly to deal with his. It wasn’t long till they were naked there, all clothing discarded, skin on skin in the Noctis twilight, hot and hard and heavy till Vaako left the bed; Riddick went up on his forearms to watch him, naked, returning with some kind of cheap-ass cooking oil from the kitchenette in one hand and his recently removed leather belt in the other. Forty seconds later, Vaako had him on his hands and knees strapped to the headboard with his belt tight around his wrists, cock balls-deep inside him. Up on his knees, straining against the leather at his wrists as Vaako gripped tight at his hips, Riddick couldn’t quite bring himself to care that he’d just let Vaako win the fight. There was always another day for him to win, and many ways to win it. 

They didn’t expect the door to open. They didn’t expect the fucking mercs. Vaako pulled back and strode across the room, disarmed the first and tossed him over at the bed in one smooth motion; Riddick twisted, one leg going up around the merc’s throat and squeezing tight till his neck broke with a joyfully familiar pop. Vaako shot two with the first’s silenced gun and put a knife into the next one’s trachea, sending him gurgling to the ground. The last two ran and Vaako slammed the door behind them. Four strides back to the bed and he thrust right back into Riddick, hard and deep and angry.

“We’re gonna need to kill those two,” Riddick said. Vaako’s hands were slick with blood at his hips as they moved together, Riddick pushing back hard against him. Vaako shifted one hand, wrapped it around Riddick’s cock and brought him off like that on his knees as he came inside him, bucking hard. Riddick turned, wrists twisting in the belt above his head, and Vaako reached up to release him. 

When Vaako looked at him, when he looked at Vaako, he knew what they were going to do. They’d stop letting the mercs come to them; they’d go get them first. 

***

“Which one’s your homeworld?” Riddick asked, with a nod at the stars through the front screen of their stolen ship. They’d left Noctis who knew how long ago. There’d been who knew how many worlds since then. 

The first time, Vaako shrugged. “Does it matter?” he replied. 

“Do you even remember?”

Vaako’s glance was warning; he knew Riddick wouldn’t heed it, or so Riddick guessed, and fled aft somehow without it actually looking like he’d fled at all before Riddick could say another word. 

“ _Why_ does it matter?” Vaako asked the second time, glancing at him only briefly before tossing the knife at the dartboard. He was an excellent shot; they’d had to pad out the bulkhead behind the bull’s-eye he’d worn out. 

“It doesn’t matter but I want to know,” Riddick said. “Pretty sure that’s reason enough.”

Vaako’s derisive smile told him it wasn’t. 

“Why does it matter _to you_?” Vaako asked the third time, taking an experimental bite of crappy-looking MRE. He scowled and spat it back out; Riddick wasn’t sure if he disliked the taste or just couldn’t make himself swallow food after all that time. He’d been trying to get used to it for weeks.

“I wanna know if you’re like me,” Riddick said, casual, like it wasn’t the admission they both knew it was. Vaako set down his fork and looked at him straight on. 

“I’m not Furyan,” he said. 

“So you remember.”

“I remember.” He picked the fork back up and he looked down at his food. Conversation closed. 

“Why does it matter _now_?” Vaako asked the fourth time, like he was expecting the question this time. Riddick was bringing the ship in to land like he’d done so many times before, Vaako sitting there in the co-pilot’s seat though he could pilot just as well. But that was always Riddick’s job. “You know I’m not Furyan.”

“You’re not exactly Necro, either.”

“All Necromongers are converts, Riddick.”

“So, what were you before?”

Vaako sighed, kicked Riddick half-hard in the calf just a little petulantly and Riddick veered off course a fraction though he’d recovered in a second. “I was on Earth when the Necromongers came,” Vaako said. “Where the fuck did you think I was from?”

Riddick shrugged. “Just didn’t realise they took Earth,” he said. “Or that long ago.”

They took a room in a cheap boarding house, Vaako checking them in with fake names like they were brothers, as if they looked anything alike though on Cerulean 8 it wasn’t like fugitives and outlaws were in short supply. Vaako showered while Riddick shaved then vice versa. Then they tooled up and threw on coats and went out into the bright blue freezing sunlight on their target’s homeworld. 

It wasn’t hard to find Toombs. He didn’t live a low-profile life there in the second largest city on a highly populated planet, full of mercs and drugs and whores and all that shady shit that landed so many guys and girls in one slam or another. There was a double-max a hop skip and a jump away on Cerulean 3, closer to the sun and perversely colder for it. Toombs had inherited his shady business offices from family that Riddick knew included still more mercs, then convicts and screws alike out on Cerulean 3. Riddick had never been there, one of the few slams he’d never paid a visit. He didn’t intend to go.

It was Vaako who killed him, after Toombs had cut open his face with a lucky shot with bright edged brass knuckles. He drove a knife up under Toombs’ jaw and put him down on the floor with a frustrated yell, turned away angry and bleeding into his collar. They took out the rest of his crew on the way back to their room; Riddick took them, to be more precise, with knives to keep it quiet, hefting them into dumpsters in filthy back alleys while Vaako pressed a surprisingly clean white handkerchief to his cheek though it was rapidly turning red. He looked intensely pissed, Riddick thought, which was amusing and fucking weird at the same time. Matters didn’t improve when Riddick had to stitch the wound there in their crappy room, Vaako cursing hotly through gritted teeth. He’d have a new scar whenever the fucker healed. One of many.

While Vaako tried to get a ration pack of corned beef hash into his mouth that night, Riddick spitting out the bones of a poorly cooked local fish, Riddick had to admit Krone’s plan hadn’t sucked as hard as it’d looked to at first glance. Vaako kept puking shit back up, hooking himself to drips to get fluids in till the crooks of his arms and the backs of his hands were all fucked up like a junkie’s. He was gaunt and drawn from some shitty combination of sleep-deprivation and malnutrition, got stomach cramps because his insides still weren’t used to food and drink. If Krone had wanted to torture the guy it was pretty tough to see how he could’ve done it better. No wonder Vaako looked pissed.

“So why do Necros marry if they don’t breed?” Riddick asked, half-muffled by his hand as he tried to fish a fish bone from his teeth. 

“You think no pain means no desire?” Vaako said, still frowning at his food as he spoke, though he did glance up. “We rely on conversion and personal longevity instead of breeding but that doesn’t mean we don’t _want_. How were you ever lord marshal without knowing this, you fucking heathen?”

Riddick shrugged; there was no fire in Vaako’s voice, just a kind of wry, dry amusement. “Never paid that much attention,” he said, spitting yet another fish bone out onto his plate. Vaako just shook his head. He’d been married for 84 years in the end, he’d told him once. She’d been dazzling.

Riddick fucked him after dinner, pinned up against the wall so hard, his hands pressed up under Riddick’s up above his head, that his cheek reopened on the crumbling paintwork in a sickly red smear. Afterwards, in bed, Riddick sponged the cut back out with disinfectant while Vaako didn’t quite manage to glower, took out the first set of stitches and sewed it up again. He licked Vaako’s blood from his fingers while Vaako watched him do it. 

“All the Furyans were like you once,” Vaako said, thoughtfully. “So we killed them.”

Riddick chuckled like that made sense. “Do you want me dead, too?”

Vaako looked at him, all dark eyes and that damned impenetrable gaze. 

“Sometimes,” he said. 

Riddick guessed Necros really did feel desire after all. 

***

When he told Vaako what he had planned for Johns, Vaako didn’t seem surprised. 

Vaako hadn’t seemed surprised in over a year but that point, of course. Not when they’d killed their eighth, ninth, tenth crews of mercs, not on any money-spinning side-job they’d managed to dream up on any backwater world in the whole damn sky. Vaako knew what to expect from him as they blew through a room in a fucking tornado of flashing blades and gunfire, somehow still every inch the killer he’d ever been in spite of his rapidly restored, restoring humanity. If anything, the pain he felt made him sharper, made him better. It just also meant he iced his shoulder at night and bitched about a fight back on Lazarus 2 where he’d landed all wrong, and now and then he had trouble digesting solid food. 

He wasn’t surprised the day they found Dahl. To be fair, it wasn’t like she’d been hiding – after their little escapade at the merc outpost on what wasn’t Furya, wasn’t Furya at all, she’d set herself up in business with Boss Johns’ blessing, gotten her own crew together and done a pretty fucking bang-up job till she’d agreed to try for Riddick. And then there Riddick was on her damn doorstep, knocking on the door of the outpost there in the back of where-the-fuck-ever where she’d set up her home camp, some lush green planet where there were no goddamn aliens to come with the rain or the dark or any other force of nature. 

Vaako shot the first guy right in the head when the door swung open, unsubtle as fuck. Dahl’s attention thus gained, she sat down with Riddick at the outpost dining table. Vaako lowered all the blinds without asking; Riddick took off his goggles to look at her. 

“I’m gonna kill you, Dahl,” Riddick told her, straight and serious. “You shouldn’t’ve looked for me.”

She shrugged. “You’ll try,” she said. 

“I can make it quick, for old times’ sake.”

“Go fuck yourself,” she said. She’d always been a firecracker, Riddick had liked that. 

It wasn’t quick. She was good but he was better and Vaako watched as he beat her down and beat her out. He hadn’t realised voyeurism was such a goddamn turn-on till he was washing Dahl’s blood off his skin in the crappy-ass outpost shower – shaving really _did_ help with that, just like he’d said – while Vaako went down on his knees in the spray. Maybe Vaako was human but Riddick could see fuck all humanity in him sometimes. 

Then, after, they sat down at the table and he told him he was going to call Johns. He’d call him right up and get him out there to that godforsaken rock with however many mercs he brought along for backup and they’d kill him where they’d buried Dahl because hell, the lady had deserved a funeral. Then it’d be over. There was just Johns left to go. 

“You’re not gonna try to stop me?”

Vaako pursed his lips in something not quite like disapproval but not a million miles away from it, either. “Do you _want_ me to try to stop you?” he asked. 

“No.”

“Then why ask?”

Riddick pulled on his goggles. “You’re fucking infuriating.”

Vaako’s expression then wasn’t quite a smile, but it wasn’t not. 

They were both eating steaks when Johns’ ship arrived, so rare they were almost dripping blood, Vaako making surprisingly good work of it all things considered. Riddick had trapped and butchered some kind of wild cow while they’d been waiting there for the past week and a half; he guessed in the scheme of things less that two weeks’ wait in space wasn’t bad going. 

“So you want to play a game,” Johns said. 

“We’ve been playing since Baby Johns died,” Riddick told him. 

Johns nodded to concede this point. “Who’s your buddy?”

Riddick watched as Vaako eyed Johns; he was gauging what Riddick’s reaction would be if he just shoved a steak knife through his eye and had done with it, that much was obvious. Riddick guessed _Lord Vaako, First Commander of the Necromonger Armada_ sounded a little grandiose for the occasion, sitting there in bloodied fatigues in an outpost near nowhere, so he just said, “Does that matter?”

Johns shrugged. “Guess not,” he said. 

Johns cooked himself a steak there on the shitty outpost gas stove and they ate together. The three of them slept under the same roof in a night’s uneasy truce while Johns’ crew stayed outside in their ship, Riddick and Vaako pushing two single bunks up together like that was normal for the two of them and Riddick guessed somewhere along the line, through the years, it’d gotten that way somehow. Riddick’s palm rested over the blades at the small of Vaako’s back. He wondered if he dreamed all the dreams he’d missed in a hundred years. They woke with dawn. And hour later, the game was on. 

It took four days to kill the twenty mercs Johns had rallied and brought with him. Riddick and Vaako split up, went separate ways just like they’d planned even though the idea of it was fucking odd after all that time; still, Vaako wasn’t exactly as suited to the terrain as Riddick was, something about Necro commanders not spending a whole lot of time in verdant forestry and stealth in combat not exactly being considered a great Necromonger virtue but four days in the woods and Johns’ team was gone. Four days of spears and traps and two compound bows they’d swiped from the outpost, wading in streams and shinning up trees to better vantage points; it was pretty fucking exhilarating after _years_ of urban warfare. The animal in Riddick was having a ball. When he and Vaako converged on the outpost, Vaako on the other hand looked scratched and dishevelled and pretty damn pissed off. 

“Don’t kill him,” Vaako said, when Riddick lifted his knife to Johns’ throat. 

“You going soft on me in your old age, Vaako?”

Vaako snorted. “Hardly,” he said. “I’ve just got a better idea.”

Johns objected but Riddick thought it was fucking hilarious when they dropped the guy on that same dusty fucking jerkwater rock where Vaako had found him that first day. The Necro armada was on its way through the system – once they’d pulled nodes from all the ships they could find across the two godforsaken towns and lifted back off into space, there was no way Johns could escape. He’d be killed or converted in a couple of weeks’ time at the outside. 

In the end, neither of the Johns boys’ blood ever got on Riddick’s hands at all. 

***

For a week after, they barely talked. Riddick figured there wasn’t much to say, or maybe there was more than either one of them was ready to discuss. It’d been a wild ride. Stage one was ending. Riddick wasn’t totally sure he’d meant it to end at all. 

For the week after that, they took a job guarding some surly-ass mobster on some planet Riddick had never even heard of. They all left pretty much unscathed at the end of it, except maybe the three would-be assassins that’d come for them. Vaako turned out to be a pretty crack shot with the sniper rifle they’d taken from the outpost after Dahl was dead. Riddick had long since quit being remotely surprised each time Vaako manifested some heretofore unknown competency; the guy was pushing 130 years old by that point, it wasn’t like he hadn’t had time to get good. 

For a week after that, they took a room on the busiest damn planet Riddick had ever seen, so many goddamn people in the iridescent purple sunlight that he almost came over claustrophobic but guessed Vaako had his reasons for choosing it. The people made ships there on Volaticus Prime, heavy craft for deep space, cargo, passengers, merc vessels, warships. Everything everywhere was touch screens and retina scans that Riddick pretty soon discovered wouldn’t work on him, came up with a buzzing error that meant they had to slink into the nearest shady establishment that’d work on trade and hand over six good guns and the codes to their ship in exchange for scannable version of their fake ID and currency floating around in some kind of fucked-up cloud system. It seemed to make sense to Vaako. Riddick got it on an intellectual level, sure, but every time they left their room he felt like a million goddamn digital eyes were on him. 

He’d never wanted an alias, never felt like creating some new and interesting identity because he _was_ an interesting identity but he guessed the mobster they’d worked for did decent work in exchange for their assistance; they were still calling each other Riddick and Vaako even though their shiny new IDs said different. They handed them over to eat something that was billed as pork in a shitty bar on the last night of the third week, in a corner out of the way with a great line of sight to the door and an easy exit through the kitchen to the alley at the back. They always had an escape plan. They’d stopped needing to discuss it maybe two years earlier, back on Lazarus, back in the pits. 

“They’re coming here, right?” Riddick said, almost casually, through a mouthful of stringy meat that he was pretty sure was _not_ pork. Probably dog. Maybe cat if they’d gotten really desperate. The place _looked_ desperate. 

Vaako paused, his fork in the air. “Yes,” he said. “You’re not going to try to stop me?”

Riddick tilted his head. “Do you _want_ me to try to stop you?”

And Vaako actually, for a moment, for a _long_ moment, looked like he was considering the available options, like he was weighing it all up, pros and cons, cost vs. return. Riddick guessed he should’ve been flattered that the idea of the alternative to a life with the Necromongers even merited consideration before Vaako said, “No.”

Vaako didn’t ask if the deal still stood and Riddick understood why. It had been three years and he’d never lied to Vaako; they were both pretty sure he wasn’t going to start now. 

They went back to the room after that, turning up their collars in the swirling snow. When they got inside, the heat turned up all the way, Riddick looked at Vaako in the cold fluorescent light as he took off his snow-damp clothes. There were more scars there on his skin now than when they’d started, some still fresh and others fading. He still iced his busted shoulder every night he could, sometimes while they ate, while Vaako bitched about how the food was never good and Riddick must’ve developed his palate in a fucking slam. Then Riddick would blow him while he fingered him, Vaako would straddle his hips and ride him or the other way around, they’d do it on their hands and knees with one holding a knife to the other’s throat till a thin line of blood stood out on their skin and Riddick wondered sometimes, after, when they turned off the lights and Riddick took off his goggles, what kind of man Vaako had been before if this was who he’d wound up being. 

They went to bed. They turned off the lights. Nights like that, Riddick could see him in the dark and Vaako let him do what he wanted to do, just a hint of a struggle; he latched onto that scar on Vaako’s neck like he could suck the motherfucking Necromonger right out of him. Vaako laughed in the start, then he went quiet. 

There was a comet in the sky when they woke the next morning; the whole planet knew what that meant. They were perhaps the only two there who weren’t afraid at all, just pensive as they watched.

“Do you still believe?” Riddick asked, as they looked into the sky. 

Vaako nodded, his eyes fixed on that comet. “Absolutely,” he said, then his gaze came down to fix heavy on Riddick instead. “Don’t you?”

There was no way to answer that question truthfully without starting a fight, an actual honest-to-God fight with fists and knees and elbows right there in the busy street and the next thing there’d be a full-scale fucking riot in the middle of the city. Riddick wasn’t exactly opposed to the idea, might’ve found it amusing, but guessed it was going to need his energy for something else pretty soon if his memories of that day Helion Prime was attacked were anything to go by. 

They’d be there soon, maybe a week, maybe a hell of a lot sooner, with Lord Marshal Krone directing the attack. There’d be Necro soldiers marching in the streets, ships in the sky, and he was pretty sure Vaako had some kind of insane fucking plan up his sleeve for the both of them to swing into action at some point during, something close to suicidal. He’d made a deal with the devil, though precisely which one of them was which remained pretty fucking tenuous. But fuck it, quid pro quo, Vaako had done his part and gotten the damn mercs off of his back, not that there wouldn’t always be more mercs, not that anything they’d done meant anything. He guessed it’d never been much more than a distraction in the end.

Sometimes he wondered what kind of man Vaako had been before; most of the time he knew that didn’t matter. Vaako was Vaako and he’d go with him because he’d said he would. What the hell, he didn’t have anyplace else to be.

Besides, he thought, as his hand settled over the knives at the small of Vaako’s back. Besides, he thought, as Vaako smiled into the sky. It might even be fun.


End file.
